3 ms·

Power per operation is certainly decreasing, not as rapidly as in the old days though. However, it is completely not clear how much compute power is necessary f

Power per operation is certainly decreasing, not as rapidly as in the old days though. However, it is completely not clear how much compute power is necessary for sufficient level of cognition that would allow L4 autonomy. Experimental cars (such as Waymo or Uber) have literally a data center in their trunk that takes up many Kilowatts of power. Whether Tesla can do it in at most a few hundred watts without LIDAR is _highly_ questionable.

robotresearcher 9y ago
Do you have a source for that? I've seen in the trunk of working research cars with less resources than a high-end gaming PC. Multiple KW is more than normal car air conditioning can deal with, since a resting human outputs about 100W. Do these cars vent to the outside? Otherwise, if outputting multiple KW, your Calfornia-based research car is gonna get nasty very quickly.
- felippee 9y ago
  My source is a chat with several engineers at companies I cannot disclose. I also used to work for a company that develops autonomous navigation solution. If you have on the order of 10 LIDARS on your vehicle and same number of cameras and other sensors, I can assure you a single Drive PX will not be enough for even basic processing of that data. Also note, that a high end gaming computer can easily exceed peak usage of 1kW, and if it is packed with say 4GPU's it very quickly approaches 2kW. The computers have custom cooling loops and vent outside, exact solutions vary between companies. And even with all that compute, nobody out there is any close to level 4, better yet level 5. And Tesla promises to solve level 5 with drive PX, few cameras and a radar (not a single LIDAR) and magical software. I'd really like to see this :)
- Fricken 9y ago
  Ford's in-house autonomous development team did a Medium post on what they were working with. They avoided hard numbers, but revealed a few interesting things: >Of course, additional functions require additional power — a lot of it. A standard gas-powered car doesn’t have enough electrical power for an autonomous vehicle, so we’ve had to tap into Fusion Hybrid’s high-voltage battery pack by adding a second, independent power converter to help create two sources of power to maintain robustness. https://medium.com/self-driven/building-fords-next-generation-autonomous-development-vehicle-82a6160a7965 https://medium.com/self-driven/building-fords-next-generatio...

robotresearcher 9y ago

Do you have a source for that? I've seen in the trunk of working research cars with less resources than a high-end gaming PC. Multiple KW is more than normal car air conditioning can deal with, since a resting human outputs about 100W. Do these cars vent to the outside? Otherwise, if outputting multiple KW, your Calfornia-based research car is gonna get nasty very quickly.

felippee 9y ago
My source is a chat with several engineers at companies I cannot disclose. I also used to work for a company that develops autonomous navigation solution. If you have on the order of 10 LIDARS on your vehicle and same number of cameras and other sensors, I can assure you a single Drive PX will not be enough for even basic processing of that data. Also note, that a high end gaming computer can easily exceed peak usage of 1kW, and if it is packed with say 4GPU's it very quickly approaches 2kW. The computers have custom cooling loops and vent outside, exact solutions vary between companies. And even with all that compute, nobody out there is any close to level 4, better yet level 5. And Tesla promises to solve level 5 with drive PX, few cameras and a radar (not a single LIDAR) and magical software. I'd really like to see this :)
Fricken 9y ago
Ford's in-house autonomous development team did a Medium post on what they were working with. They avoided hard numbers, but revealed a few interesting things: >Of course, additional functions require additional power — a lot of it. A standard gas-powered car doesn’t have enough electrical power for an autonomous vehicle, so we’ve had to tap into Fusion Hybrid’s high-voltage battery pack by adding a second, independent power converter to help create two sources of power to maintain robustness. https://medium.com/self-driven/building-fords-next-generation-autonomous-development-vehicle-82a6160a7965 https://medium.com/self-driven/building-fords-next-generatio...